a blog on programming languages and other stuff…

An update on VBx…

Things have been pretty quiet around Panopticon Central since I did a bit of talking about “VBx” back in May. Partially this has reflected the fact that we’re at a pretty early stage of thinking about the post-VS 2008 world, so there isn’t a lot solid to talk about. Partially this has reflected the usual shifts in emphasis and strategy that occur around the end of a major product cycle as more and more people start to get freed up to think beyond what they’re delivering next month. And partially this has reflected that I’ve got two kids at home now, and that just seems to suck up some of the extra time that I used to use for blogging…

That said, I think it’s worth spending a moment catching up on what’s going on with “VBx” (at least that I can talk about in public).

I think the first thing that’s worth saying is that pretty much everyone seemed to dislike the codename “VBx,” mostly because it overlaps too much with the old VBX controls and partially because it seemed to imply that we were developing another version of the language (which we aren’t). Fair enough. For the moment, then, instead of talking about “VBx,” I’m going to talk about “VB10”. This isn’t an official codename at all, just a personal shorthand way of referring to “the next major version of Visual Basic.” Maybe it will be version 10, or maybe it won’t, but I hope it will be a little less confusing than “VBx” was, in that it should emphasize the continued unity of the VB language.

Back in May, our goal was to have something to CTP in the PDC07 timeframe, which would have been this month. But that turned out to be a more aggressive timeframe than expected. However, even if we haven’t got something solid to CTP just yet, we’ve still got some ideas of where we’re headed and what you might expect to see in VB10. So over the next few months, my goal is to write some speculative pieces on what we are thinking. The purpose would not be to make feature commitments or say what’s definitely in or out of the next version, but instead to get some of our ideas out there and see what people think, see whether there is any traction or not, and determine if we’re crazy or not.

Each entry, though, would need to come with some pretty heavy caveats. To wit:

WARNING! This is a speculative post. It reflects the individual thoughts of the author at a particular point in time. It does not necessarily reflect the future beliefs of the author, nor does it necessarily reflect the beliefs, current or future, of the team as a whole. No conclusions can or should be drawn from this article about future features, plans, or directions of the Visual Basic language. These features may show up in the product as some point, or they may not. If they do show up, they may not look or work as described here. Caveat emptor. No warranties expressed or implied. Your mileage may vary. Fnord.

I hope this will give people a pretty accurate idea of how big a grain of salt to take them with…